On the Pilgrim Road - Interview with Richard Shiels, Director, Newark Earthworks
Submitted by bat400 on Monday, 12 October 2009 Page Views: 8227
EventsCountry: United States State: Ohio Type: Misc. EarthworkInternal Links:
The time of pilgrimage has come. Worshipers arrive, beaching canoes on the banks of rivers and creeks. They walk up broad avenues cleared of trees and brush, bounded by earthen walls on both sides. They reach geometric figures made on the face of the earth, sacred enclosures created to celebrate and to mark the motions of the moon in the heavens. Some Pilgrims have traveled for days; many for much longer. Some bring exotic gifts: shells from southern waters, obsidian from the west, beaten copper from the north.
Ohio State University’s Associate Professor Richard Shiels and other historians and archaeologists speculate that such a gathering may explain why the Newark Earthworks and other mounds were built roughly two thousand years ago by an American culture now defined as the Hopewell. The large earth banks and mounds created in the forms of circles, squares, a linked octagon, and pathways between structures have been slowly surrounded by the Ohio communities of Newark and Heath over the last 200 years. Although much of the complex found by the first European settlers has been destroyed by farming and development, a large group of mounds forming a Great Circle and a linked Octagon and Circle were preserved. The geometric complex is the largest known in the world and has recently been nominated for inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Ohio State University’s Newark campus is the home of the Newark Earthworks Center. The center’s Director, Richard Shiels, spoke with the Megalithic Portal about the Center, its history, goals, and upcoming events leading up to the center’s 2009 Newark Earthwork Day on October 17th.
This year’s event has Pilgrimage as its theme and features speakers from a variety of backgrounds. University researchers' presentations as well as elementary school student projects will be exhibited, along with an art exhibit at a university gallery. The following day, Sunday October 18th, the Newark complex’s Octagon Earthwork will be open to the public for tours of the entire site. This is one of only four days each year that this part of the complex may be appreciated by walking through its grounds.
Shiels explained that the Newark Earthwork Center was created following controversy over just how “public” the publicly owned Octagon Earthwork site actually was.
Newark and the state of Ohio took steps in the nineteen century to conserve the largest features of the sites by purchasing the land for public parks, fairgrounds, and a National Guard training camp. Eventually invasive activities were eliminated, but the Octagon Earthwork site was leased for what is now the Moundbuilders Country Club, a private golf club. In 1999 Moundbuilders requested permission to destroy a portion of the mounds in order to enlarge its club house. By this time there was heightened scientific interest in the earthworks due to a study by Earlham College professors Ray Hively and Robert Horn. Hively and Horn’s analysis showed just how complex and precise the earthwork design and construction was, supporting that the vast site was intentionally aligned to lunar cyclic motion. So, vocal groups and individuals spoke out against the proposed damage.
In 2000, the Friends of the Mounds advocacy group was formed to protest any further damage to the mounds and argue against the golf club for increased public access, if not breaking the lease held by the Ohio Historical Society (OHS). “They didn’t want us to see the lease,” recalls Shiels. With legal assistance, the group found the lease had been extended to 2078. The OHS eventually turned down the golf club’s request to build over part of the earthworks. But the Friends pushed for a formal agreement of public access days. They also supported continued and renewed religious use of the site by Native Americans.
As time passed, Shiels said, “the Moundbuilders dug in their heels. There was no sign that access would be extended beyond the four days.” The Friends of the Mounds had generated attention, but Shiels and others wanted more to be done.
“I came to the place where I said, ‘I can’t wait anymore.’ We needed to be doing the things that we would have done if the lease didn’t exist. The Newark Earthworks needed to be promoted and studied.” With the support of Newark OSU’s Director and Dean, William MacDonald, Shiels and others formed the Newark Earthworks Center (NEC) in 2002.
Unlike the Friends of the Mounds, Newark Earthworks Center has an academic, not political, focus. The center promotes continued research of the Newark complex. The Center is listed as part of OSU’s Newark campus “Outreach and Engagement.” This engagement now includes Newark City and Licking County government, the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, and the Ohio Historical Society.
Shields says the NEC's relationship with the Society is very good. “OHS has indeed changed its position,” since the days when the Friends of the Mounds and other protesters changed the status between the Moundbuilder’s golf club and the OHS. Some Earthworks Center members, including Shields, were on a panel contributing to an OHS's Historic Site Management Plan with specific sections covering responsibilities at the Octagon site.
Major Newark Earthworks Center activities involve educating the public. NEC has created guides for teachers and their students and provides teaching opportunities through the Newark Earthwork Days and other events. NEC members help staff the museum at the Great Circle site, also owned and managed by the OHS. The Great Circle museum is also the site of the Licking County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. These cooperative efforts help bring more than a thousand visitors a month to the Great Circle Earthwork and its museum, where NEC members provide interpretation and tours.
The center’s 2009 fall events focus on Newark as a pilgrimage site. Richard Shiels is in the majority of theory that the geometric earthworks were designed and used for a ceremonial or social function.
“Speaking as a historian,” Shiels said, “we piece together the information we have. The evidence for [ceremony and] Pilgrimage is the site itself.” Shiels lists the following facts:
- The earthworks are not burial mounds. A small cemetery area did exist to the east, but none of the geometric structures contained burials.
- Newark was not a large residential center. No signs of “household goods” are found here in densities indicating a village or town.
- The lunar alignments discovered by Hively and Horn are too accurate to have been coincidence. The structures incorporate standard units of measure. This supports the earthworks being designed for purpose to a very specific plan.
- The “Hopewell Interaction Sphere” is the area of goods transfer in which exotic materials have been found in Hopewell areas. Many researchers find this trade to be curiously one-way, with exotic goods found frequently in Hopewell context, but materials specific to the Newark area (Vanport Flint) not found in abundance outside the area. This has suggested that transient visitors brought these goods, not for trade, but as offerings, perhaps in return for healing ceremonies.
- Oral history says it was a place of ceremony.
- The structures are vast. Large numbers could have been accommodated for gathering together and activities. Walled pathways lead between structures, suggesting processional activity.
- Scholarship of religion emphasizes pilgrimage as an activity of worship.
Shiels concludes, “All this suggests that this was a place of ceremony.” And as no other Hopewell site has this complexity and precision of earthworks, the information available supports the theory that the area attracted people to come, temporarily, but in large numbers, for ceremonial activities associated with the alignments found in the Newark Earthworks – a special site of Pilgrimage.
A fascinating proposal is associated with this concept of Pilgrimage. Dr. Bradley Lepper, Curator of Archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society, is a recent proponent of the existence of the “Great Hopewell Road,” a hypothesized roadway that ran from the Hopewell mound groups near Chillicothe, more than 60 miles away, to the Octagon-Circle structure. It is a fact that numerous nineteen century surveyors charted a cleared, smooth pathway southwest of the Octagon-Circle earthwork. This was similar to walled pathways with boundary walls a meter or more high, leading between structures at the Newark complex.
This road was surveyed as being straight, having a uniform width, and extending for at least six miles southwest of the Newark earthworks. Later proponents have found aerial traces of such a straight “roadbed” as much as twelve miles south west of Newark, on the same heading. Lepper’s analysis shows that if this path was extended it would cross the octagon and linked circle structure called Highbank Works, directly across the Scioto river from the more well known Mound City earthwork site. Highbank also has been found to have similar construction measurements as the Newark Octagon, as well as lunar alignments. And although no physical traces of the Newark road have been found close to Highbank, Dr. Lepper’s summary of evidence for the road is compelling.
Shiels says, “Brad Lepper will be the first to tell you that it is a hypothesis. But it’s supported by the information we have.” He also notes that the premise that the Newark sites were a ceremonial center is not dependent on the existence of such a road. However, following the 2009 Newark Earthwork Day theme, a new event is taking place this year, the Walk with the Ancients. This “pilgrimage” walk will start at the Chillicothe site on October 10th. The route will be along the closest modern trails and roads matching the proposed Great Hopewell Road path. The walkers will arrive at Newark on October 16th.
Shiels conducted an orientation for a core of twenty-five walkers on October 3rd. They include local people and those from outside Ohio, including the walkers from Vermont, South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Indiana Reservation, and anthropologist Vincent Stanzione, who has participated in numerous ritual walks with the indigenous Mayas of Santiago Atitlan. Nightly stops on the route will include historical farms and the Tarlton Cross Mound. Public events are planned for each night's stop.
Again, Shiels spoke of education and outreach at the heart of this event. “It’s all about teaching. Our sense is that people in these little towns [between Highbanks and Newark earthworks] may not know about the ancient sites in their own communities. We’ll be walking right by a primary school at one point.” The group of walkers will leave the Highbank Works site, cross the Scioto River by canoe, and begin their trek.
Seven days later, with the sound of drums and following a staff bearer, the modern pilgrims will reach geometric figures made on the face of the earth, sacred enclosures created to celebrate and to mark the motions of the moon in the heavens.
Additional background:
Hively, Ray; Horn, Robert. Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio. Journal of History of Astronomy, Archaeoastronomy Supplement, Vol. 13, p.S1 ... 00/1982.
Hively, Ray; Horn, Robert.
A Statistical Study of Lunar Alignments at the Newark Earthworks, Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Fall 2006.
Lepper, Bradley T. "The Great Hopewell Road and the Role of Pilgrimage in the Hopewell Interaction Sphere." Recreating Hopewell, ed. Charles and Buikstra. University Press of Florida. 2006.
Romain, William F.; Burks, Jarrod . LiDAR Imaging of the Great Hopewell Road, 04 February 2008
National Historic Landmark description of the Newark Earthworks, http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=449&ResourceType=Site.
On 28 June 2008 the Newark Advocate reported that the Ohio Historical Society voted unanimously to move forward with the National Park Service study to evaluate the feasibility of the Newark Earthworks becoming affiliated with or becoming part of the national park system.
Note: Earthworks Day and the Walk with the Ancients on October 17th and 18th. Events go well; Newark looks to the future.
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